Just when we’re almost too preoccupied to notice, leave it to Bob Dylan to casually drop his first new song in eight years — a stunningly rendered commentary that provides exactly the perspective we need to make sense of current events. In “Murder Most Foul,” a 17-minute epic posted online late Thursday night, the Shakespeare of our times not only turns the assassination of President Kennedy into a narrative device, he also rightly depicts it as the defining event that set this country on in its downward spiral, orchestrated by a series of evil schemers conceiving plots of Shakespearean scale.

With surgical finesse, Dylan dissects wide swaths of history, yet he does it through gymnastic brain leaps that conjure images of kernals exploding in a popcorn machine. Just the slyly subtle pop-cultural references alone, much less how intricately he connects them, will leave Dylanologists begging for new book deals to present their deep dive research.

From early delights such as his British-invasion invocation of Gerry & the Pacemakers’ “Ferry Cross the Mersey,” he segues into namechecks of nearly every jazz great (and rhyming of Thelonious Monk with “all that junk”), allusions to Robert Johnson and Jim Crow America, mentions of Woodstock, Altamont, Tommy, Houdini and various mobsters, and lines like “Play ‘Blue Sky,’ play Dickey Betts,” “Play ‘Merchant of Venice,’ play merchants of death/play ‘Stella By Starlight’ for Lady Macbeth.”

It sounds like stream-of-consciousness rap, but Dylan’s associations are too finely threaded to be completely extemporaneous. He researched carefully, and he puts everything in contexts both broadly sketched and pinpoint precise.

At one moment during his 17-minute recitation (mostly spoken, not sung), I couldn’t help missing Lou Reed; I could hear him — and Leonard Cohen, too — delivering this treatise, perhaps trading stanzas with Bob; it has that Songs for Drella vibe. And that gorgeous piano; I need to know who’s playing that stately, haunting piano, and the violin and soft percussion that emphasize and elevate Dylan’s keen insights, and still-sharp, sometimes biting wit.

He exhibits both in two key lines.

“What is the truth? Where did it go?” Dylan wonders at one point. “Ask Oswald and Ruby; they oughta know.” And just after the halfway mark, he recalls, “The day that they killed him, someone said to me, ‘Son, the age of the antichrist has just only begun.’”

Talk about 20-20 hindsight. If this is just a history lesson, it’s a most powerful one. If it’s an elegy for the America we once knew — an America of hope and promise, before the anger and despair — well, maybe we need to mourn that loss, and analyze it, before — if — we can find a way to join together and resurrect it.

This much, we do know: In times of adversity especially, we rely on our poets and painters, our singers and songwriters, to reflect our mood and often, guide us where we need to go. And 60-some years after Dylan released “Blowin’ in the Wind” and “A Hard Rain’s a-Gonna Fall” on The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan (six months before Kennedy’s assassination), he’s still that folk singer, telling us what we oughta know — and need to hear.

Bob Dylan: Murder Most Foul review – a dark, dense ballad for the end times4 / 5 stars 4 out of 5 stars.Dylan’s first new song in eight years is a fascinating portrait of his obsession with JFK’s assassination, rich with pop cultural detail and apocalyptic dread

People have mooted that it’s a standalone release, appearing now because Dylan understandably thinks it’s timely, March 2020 being a pretty apropos moment to release an epic song filled with death and horror and apocalyptic dread (“The age of the antichrist has just begun … it’s 36 hours past judgment day”), or perhaps to give his diehard fans further incentive to stay indoors. You rather get the feeling some of them will still be self-isolating months after the coronavirus all-clear has sounded, delicately unpicking its manifold knotty allusions – the line about playing it for Carl Wilson down Gower Avenue requires the listener to know that the late Beach Boy sang backing vocals on Desperados Under the Eaves, the concluding track from Warren Zevon’s eponymous 1976 album, which ended with the line “look away down Gower Avenue” – and arguing on message boards as to whether the Susie mentioned midway through is just a reference to the Everly Brothers, or to Suze Rotolo, the girlfriend with whom Dylan watched the aftermath of Kennedy assassination unfolding, holed up in their New York apartment.

For a song that lasts 17 minutes, there isn’t a great deal to Murder Most Foul musically. The arrangement hovers atmospherically in the distance, a haze of tumbling piano, lightly struck drums and violin, its softness at odds with the tone of the lyrics. One comparison currently being bandied about is to Don McLean’s American Pie, itself a kind of bubblegum populist take on Dylan’s oblique referential songs of the 60s, but American Pie had a catchy tune and a singalong chorus. Here, there’s nothing that even vaguely resembles a standard structure and Dylan swiftly abandons any pretence of there being a vocal melody: it’s essentially a recitation set to music.

The point is clearly the lyrics, which are dense and intriguing enough to hold your interest, and give the listener plenty to digest. Quite aside from all the cultural references, there’s a narrator that keeps switching from Kennedy himself to Dylan, who in turn seems to keep switching from firebrand mode to the grimly resigned old grouch of Things Have Changed and It’s All Good (“I hate to tell you Mister but only dead men are free”) and a plethora of details about the assassination itself: “Don’t say Dallas don’t love you, Mr President” is a mangling of the last words spoken to Kennedy by Nellie Connally, the first lady of Texas.

The JFK assassination looms large in Dylan’s history, despite his assurance that “I didn’t feel it more than anybody else … the whole thing about my reaction to the assassination is overplayed”. Certainly, it bothered him enough to give a rambling speech at an awards ceremony shortly afterwards saying he “saw something of himself” in Lee Harvey Oswald. (He was roundly booed.) He also subsequently visited the assassination site and indeed wrote about it, albeit in a sheaf of unpublished typescripts that were auctioned in the 90s. And it’s clearly been bothering him more recently: a 2012 exhibition of his paintings featured one of Oswald and one of Oswald’s killer, Jack Ruby.

Is the litany of music, film and literature that consumes the song’s second half intended to suggest its author thinks art is a meaningless distraction at moments of tragedy, or vitally important? The condescending tone of “Hush little children, you’ll understand / the Beatles are coming, they want to hold your hand” implies the former, although the very timing of Murder Most Foul’s release suggests it’s the latter. It also suggests an artist nearing 80, but continually moving forward – musically, it’s unlike anything Dylan has done before – and as wilfully contrary as ever.

“If I was more sensitive about it than anyone else, I would have written a song about it, wouldn’t I?” he protested in 1971 when asked about the Kennedy assassination. Now he has.

Quoteslewanall these rumors have been discussion at expectingrain.com and there now is some kind of consensus that they are nothing more than rumors and/or just fake

Might want to check on those rumors again...

no need to since this in an old recording (as stated on bobdylan.com – the song sounds like a outtake from Tempest)

He didnt say it was an old recording. He said it was 'an unreleased song we recorded a while back'. Thats a pretty vague comment, could be 5 years or 5 months ago for all we know. Typical of Bob to be vague. 'Nothing is revealed', as it were.

Going by his voice which was a lot more ragged in 2012 than it was on the Sinatra albums, it sounds considerably more recent than 'Tempest'.

Quoteslewanall these rumors have been discussion at expectingrain.com and there now is some kind of consensus that they are nothing more than rumors and/or just fake

Might want to check on those rumors again...

no need to since this in an old recording (as stated on bobdylan.com – the song sounds like a outtake from Tempest)

He didnt say it was an old recording. He said it was 'an unreleased song we recorded a while back'. Thats a pretty vague comment, could be 5 years or 5 months ago for all we know. Typical of Bob to be vague. 'Nothing is revealed', as it were.

Going by his voice which was a lot more ragged in 2012 than it was on the Sinatra albums, it sounds considerably more recent than 'Tempest'.

right, his voice sounds more recent than 'Tempest', but the song itself and especially the lyrics sound were much like they are from the 'Tempest' era. Maybe he rerecorded the song (just like he did with Mississippi)

Quoteslewanall these rumors have been discussion at expectingrain.com and there now is some kind of consensus that they are nothing more than rumors and/or just fake

Might want to check on those rumors again...

no need to since this in an old recording (as stated on bobdylan.com – the song sounds like a outtake from Tempest)

He didnt say it was an old recording. He said it was 'an unreleased song we recorded a while back'. Thats a pretty vague comment, could be 5 years or 5 months ago for all we know. Typical of Bob to be vague. 'Nothing is revealed', as it were.

Going by his voice which was a lot more ragged in 2012 than it was on the Sinatra albums, it sounds considerably more recent than 'Tempest'.

right, his voice sounds more recent than 'Tempest', but the song itself and especially the lyrics sound were much like they are from the 'Tempest' era. Maybe he rerecorded the song (just like he did with Mississippi)

As MrEcho previously posted - "Most certainly a new recording from early 2020, confirming the rumors of sessions in LA in January/February", and when it was actually written is beside the point.The fact is that no matter the who, what, where, when, and how this was written and/or recorded, it's great to have an original NEW Dylan tune - especially in times like these.

QuoteGazzaIts also a bit bizarre that timewise, Bob's new song is double the length of new material produced by the Stones in the last 15 years. :-)

Always great to hear the musings of Gazza on matters Stones, Dylan, Neil Young and the music world in general!

Speaking of Neil Young, there's the mesmerizing Driftin' Back from 2012 that clocks in at staggering 27+ minutes.And from the same album, Walk Like a Giant and Ramada Inn that are both over 16 minutes....